A Tangled Blog

I scrapped my long post; I think I'll post pictures in a few batches. I am extremely interested in seeing what you guys think of this house. It's in Park Corner, PEI--the house where LMM mostly lived from age 2 until she married at age 37. She lived with her grandparents. Her grandfather was a senator and her grandmother apparently was sort of mean to her. They had a strained relationship.


The house is widely considered to be Maud's basis for Ingleside. It has the verandah, and seven bedrooms, and a nice big pantry. There is a windowseat on the stair landing, and trees in the wide, broad yard. Behind the house are fields and across the street is "Silver Bush," where Maud's cousins lived. The Pulpit stone (the rock seen in the front yard, by the house, over to the left) lives here, and so does Magog (Gog was broken in an accident a hundred years ago; that's my husband James holding Magog, above). The house also holds the original rosebud tea set, the china basket that was in the "Blue Chest of Rachel Ward," and the grandfather clock with the dent in its door that Maud wrote into The Story Girl books.



I felt like I could see this yard plowed up for potato plants, like in RoI.

One of LMM's cousins still lives in the house. He is an amazing man, very irreverent and kind. He gave a great tour, and pointed out the view from Maud's bedroom window:



When I saw it I cried out loud, "It's Rainbow Valley!" The stream and the trees in the distance--not exactly what I pictured, but close enough. And our host told us that indeed, Maud used to refer to the little place across the road as "her valley" and she went there to read and think.

I want to tell you a little about the house's layout. You walk in through the front door into a large, deep hallway with a staircase. The wallpaper there is dark and patterned with flowers. On the right, if you are facing the stairs, is the parlour, which is big and grand. Across from the parlour, on the left, is the dining room. Off of the dining room, at the back, is the kitchen. Upstairs, seven bedrooms are ringed around a central hallway/sitting area.

I had no trouble at all picturing this place as Ingleside. It seemed like it could be. The house was big enough so that it might have belonged to a country doctor and his large brood, but not so big as to be ostentatious. It was very sweet and simple. I also felt that at any time Maud might walk in and say hello to me. It felt like she had only stepped out, but might be back at any moment. A lovely place, with lots of light, and so many things referenced in the books! I had no idea so many of the knickknacks mentioned actually do exist!



So what do you think? Do any of these things look familiar to you? Were they not what you were expecting? I know I, for one, always thought Ingleside would be yellow. Let me know if you think it looks like it should, like how you imagined it, or not at all what you expected.